Jom’s smile grew wider. When his lips parted, I saw sharpened fangs in a pale face that I really think I would have noticed earlier, had they been present. The shock of seeing them propelled me upright, so I found myself now sitting.

I finally remembered I could breathe. In fact, I was disoriented and I began to breathe more and more quickly. Jom placed a hand on my bare shoulder, reminding me that he had patted me on the back before I died—if that is really what happened. But I quickly focused on my breathing as my attention turned back to the present—as much as I could with the confrontation of this transformed Jom/not-Jom who stood before me.

“You’re all right,” he said. And I noticed that his eyes were different as well. There were no whites around the pupils—if pupils even existed within that gaze, as far as black within black could be discerned. I blinked, trying to wipe the image from my vision, and while my ability to open and close my eyes had returned, the being I sat next to didn’t change. It was Jom. But it was a different Jom than the Section Second that I had known as the silently efficient assistant to Vrög.

Of course, you’ll have to understand that the company and mining were everything that I had ever known. I didn’t quite understand that it was all gone at first. Which I didn’t understand because that was just about unthinkable. I didn’t say undesirable. Especially feeling immediate relief in the form of a faint antiseptic smell that didn’t make my eyes water as the aroma in the mines had always assaulted my senses.

No one had ever left the company that I had ever known about. And no one left the mines until their final out. Did I just die? Was I—out? Was this the next cycle?

But for all the immediate and pressing implications of the change that I just experienced, all I could think about was what is the deal with those eyes?

Jom must have noted my curious stare, as he placed a thin metal frame holding two small opaque caps on his face, letting the whole thing rest on his nose and ears. I waved my hand in front of his now-hidden eyes.

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “Can you see?” Jom moved away from my hands. I was embarrassed that I had been caught staring.

“They’re just glasses…” Jom said, turning his head slightly. “That’s right. You’ve never seen glasses before—all you humans in the mines get your eyes surgically corrected, and the faceplate on the helmets provide eye protection.” He patted his pockets. “Sorry I don’t have a pair for you to try—”

“You humans?” I muttered, interrupting. “At least you’ve got clothes,” I said, louder.

I wasn’t embarrassed by my nudity. There had been no reason to be concerned about that sort of thing in the barracks. I shrugged my shoulders. “But I’m thinking that is the least of our differences.”

I looked around, now that I could see. I was sitting on a cot—well, all I slept on in the mining barracks were cots and bunks, so I thought that’s what it was at the time. I later learned that it was a hospital bed. That was the first bed I ever slept in, and I was unconscious the whole time, so please excuse me for my inaccuracy.

“I’ve got a something for you to wear, if you want to put it on,” Jom said. I was still looking around. The walls were white, consistently and cleanly uniform, unlike the walls on the mining transport vessels that I’d known—it took me a while to figure out that I probably wasn’t in a mine anymore.

“Is that a uniform?” On a few occasions, I had seen security guards from a distance. I had never put much thought to who or what security was, although I had heard of the concept and it simply went without saying that no miner ever messed with a guard. Ever. As rumors go, the ones where the guards were actually robots made to look like people were my favorite. “Is this a mining security installation?”

“Not exactly,” he said, “but close.” Was he being cryptic? Yes. Was I as completely lost regardless of how he answered my questions? Also, yes.

I took the coverall but hesitated at the unusual short-sleeved and short-legged garments from Jom. “How do these, um, work?” I could guess, but the standard-issue unitard was all I had ever known. I was a bit out of my element, to say the least.

Jom showed me, and I dressed myself but was distracted. Looking carefully at his hands, at first I was in denial. My fingers didn’t bend backwards. His shouldn’t either…

“We’re a lot more different than I ever thought possible,” I said. “Aren’t we?”

“Well, we’re both bilaterally symmetrical, oxygen-breathing, carbon-based bipeds,” he said. “But yes, biologically speaking, that’s about all we have in common.” He had noticed me looking at his hands, so he furled and unfurled, curled and warped and twisted his ‘fingers’ at first independently and then through motions so intricate I couldn’t follow. At the synchronized display of tentacle-like versatility I was enthralled, watching with unabashed interest and even amusement.

“You like this?” he asked. “You’re going to love listening to me play music.”

I paused to think for a bit, but I stopped after a moment.

“What’s music?” Jom’s face fell. Even in his alien features, I could recognize surprise.

“Just kidding,” I said. “I know what music is. No. Really.”

* * *

Jom led me from the convalescing room in which I had awoken into a corridor terminating at both ends in more tunnels—hallways, sorry—perpendicular to this one.

“Not that way,” Jom said.

I’d been looking down each of the alternatives presented to me in the hallway. And the one hall where my gaze lingered longest was full of the most incredible—and at the time, completely incomprehensible—variation of living beings I ever imagined in a collection that walked, crawled, slithered, floated or somehow otherwise moved swiftly into and then right out of my sight as they hurried on their way past the intersection.

“Let’s take it slow,” he said. “This way,” he took my arm and turned away from the busy traffic, “is a restricted corridor for recovering patients. It’s… Quieter.”

I stumbled as I followed, unable to look away from the indescribable possibilities of life I had never before imagined. Awkwardly, I followed, despite my gaze lingering upon the corridor in the opposite direction. “I’ve never before seen anyone who appeared different from me, but I guess maybe you aren’t the only one I knew who wore a disguise—”

“Actually, as far as you’re concerned, I am indeed the only one,” he said as we left the corridor and the glimpse of life beyond the narrow confines I previously understood. “You’ve led a sheltered life, of sorts,” he continued while we walked. “Born on a prison moon, sold into slavery to an illegal asteroid mining concern… And now, here you are. Actually, you’ve traveled farther than all of humanity despite not even knowing it.”

We passed more doors that apparently hid rooms like the one in which I awoke. Did they house others like me? I couldn’t bring myself to ask. But other questions poured forth. “Why am I here? What is this place? Who are you?” I asked.

“You have so many questions, Kerf—”

“Cheryuff,” I said.

“Whatever.” His smile, without the hint of fangs I glimpsed earlier, was disarming. “I could hide who and what I am from your kind. But you better believe I was watching for anyone who was different. And I found you.”

“I’m… Not human?”

“Oh, you’re definitely human, all right,” he said. He looked at me closely. “And just a little bit more, perhaps.”

“More than human? How so?”

“I have no idea.” He shook his head, still smiling. “Yet.”

“Are there others like me?” I asked. We approached a pair of large doors that stretched from floor to ceiling and were as wide as the corridor. Jom didn’t slow down as we arrived at the end of the hallway.

“Maybe,” he said. He pushed open the doors. “But you’re the only human here—remember that.”

Staring in awe at the immense cavern—I mean, common room—we had just entered, I could only mutter, “How could I forget?”

* * *

The vast room was empty of other beings, but not empty of various chairs, benches, boxes, tables, racks and countless contraptions some of which that I still to this day have no clue about with regard to their possible purpose. Despite all the time I would spend recuperating there, a sense of mystery still wraps around my memory of the place, coloring my perception of all that I try to remember. Yet my ignorance had only just barely started to fall away.

We walked through what I later learned was the physical therapy center, where I stopped in the middle. “Jom, please tell me: how did I get here?” I was exasperated. “What happened to the others at asteroid 944-H-whatever?”

“Nothing happened,” Jom turned to me and crossed his arms—they looked like arms, at least—across his chest. “Just a routine incident—”

“There’s nothing routine about jettisoning a reactor—”

“Which never happened.” I once again remembered Jom touching my back before the explosion.

“What did happen?” I asked.

“I knocked you out, as they say.”

I didn’t ask who ‘they’ were.

“Then,” he continued. “I ran some basic compatibility tests while you were unconscious and the miners evac’d off of 944-Hidalgo—that’s the name I’ve always known for that rock—before transporting us both here, running more tests, and, well, now here we are.”

“Which is where?”

“Come with me,” he said, and walked to the far edge of the room, where the walls were colored blue—but they weren’t walls, and they weren’t any particular color. White streaks appeared as I moved closer to the edge, parallax apparently keeping them in their place as I got nearer to what I learned were like portholes—windows—and the white streaks were clouds. Clouds in a blue sky: perhaps the most common of human experiences, but that was the first time in my life I had ever seen it.

The blue seemed to go on and on forever until a distant horizon sliced horizontally through the scene before me, separating sky from ground. The ground was just as unusual as the blue sky, as never before had I seen living plants under a blazing sun.

“We’re very, very far from your birthplace—what your kind calls the Sol system. Humanity—of which you are a member—hasn’t yet crossed the interstellar gulfs that separate star systems. But they will. And if that should happen relatively soon, they’ll be greeted by you, their local keeper of the peace.”

“Wait—local what of the what?”

“Come on, you know the phrase ‘keeper of the peace,’ right?”

“Well, yes. As a metaphor,” I protested. “Are you literally a keeper of the peace?”

“Here? We all are. It’s what we do,” Jom said.

“From my experience, what you do is spy, and—and kidnap people. Namely, me!” I felt frustration and fear growing in me. Yet at the same time I was slowly realizing that I had just escaped the miserable existence that had been my life.

That, in itself, was nothing short of incredible.

I looked out over green hills covered with plants that I later learned were trees, swaying in winds that I’ve never felt. Hills and valleys with freely running water, simply existing and basking in the intense, bright light of a sun that involuntarily brought a smile to my face, even as my eyes squinted at the dazzling vision before me.

I had fallen silent, lost in the experience. But even as I tried to absorb all that I had seen before me, my frustration grew. Yet, the focus of my ire wasn’t Jom. Oh, I was still upset at the violation and I promised myself that I would check and double-check my back if he ever touched me again. But being denied this—the experience of seeing living things and sunlight—was a crime of a magnitude that I couldn’t take in all at once, regardless of what I was experiencing.

A question formed within me. “Does being a keeper of the peace mean being also a righter of wrongs?”

“Hmm. That’s a good question, Kerf. But, one thing at a time, shall we?”

Next Chapter: III: Out (Gung Ho and Little Pluck)—NSFW